Review: When Graveyards Yawn by G. Wells Taylor.

This was an interesting and intriguing mystery with a twist. The characters were remarkable developed Zombie’s. The author did a unique job mixing gothic rising with an unsentimental detective mystery using common sense. The Apocalypse has brought change and stopped all aging to the few living and no babies could be born and dead people started rising from their graves and became a community called Greasetown. It was a visual rainy day from page one to the last page. However, that didn’t stop business owners from moving on with making a living.

Most of the zombie’s are intelligent and have retained their former mental capabilities and the ones who didn’t resent them. There is a few ways to end the dead lives completely. The ones who don’t make it are delivered to the town’s body junk yard. If some one needs a body part they retrieve it at that place.

Wildclown Investigations was open for business and Tommy Wildclown and his best friends a corpse name Fat Elmo and they soon find themselves involved in an encounter for control that will either offer them hope or doom for humanity. Wildclown doesn’t believe he’s doomed because he doesn’t have a body and doesn’t really know who he is. He is a disembodied spirit who hovers over people and after many tries he finally was able to possess Tommy Wildclown’s body from time to time. Elmo takes whatever Wildclown dishes out and survives being abuse by this new inner person that Tommy Wildclown has become. Tommy drinks to much, smokes, and wears clown makeup to keep people from seeing who he really is.

The first customer of the day walks into Wildclown’s office who is a dead lawyer who wants to hire a detective to find his killer. One thing the dead man claims that when he began to animate, he heard a baby crying…. This claim brings more to the investigation because now they need to find the phantom baby who was conceived and was delivered and breathing as a live human being. The town doesn’t want Tommy investigating and looking for a baby and his life is threatened from the skeletal mob boss or the Authority. It’s really the inner spirit invading Tommy’s body that is more determined to find the mother and baby. There have been no new births for fifty years….

Wells creates a brilliant and unique bunch of zombie’s and some humor weaves throughout the story. I’m probably making the story sound confusing but it flowed smoothly to the end. ( )

DFN at 4 % ! It was so overwhelmed with Similes I just couldn't continue it. I keep going back over the same lines trying to figure out WTH the author was saying. ( )

Taylor has a very interesting premise in this book, but with the F-word at least once on every other page, I had to give it a lower rating--that's a whole lot more cursing than I like in my literature. ( )